Three March readings up the North West coast (set lists)

ONE 

This was part of a two monthly poetry evening at the above venue, that I will be helping out with in the coming months. I was the headline act and I read a full (20 minute set) of poems as a retrospective of my writing, reading from my selected poems History or Sleep. I read the selection I made there of my other book, Warrant Error. It seemed to go down well, and I was pleased to see Adam Hampton there, who wrote on this sequence in The Robert Sheppard Companion. He also read in one of the open mic slots. Just for the record the upcoming dates are 21/5 (with Tim Allen), 16/7 (with Sarah Crewe), 17/9 (with Maria Isakova-Bennett) and 19/11 (undecided) this year. I'll leave the details here:  

 Headline Poets – Featuring big names who push the form forward.

✅ 8 Open Mic Slots – Step up, whether it’s your first time or your fiftieth.

✅ Sell Your Work – Poets can bring books, zines, and merch to share.

✅ A Community That Gets It – No gimmicks, just words that matter.

Be Part of It

📍 Venue: Royales, Lord Street, Southport

🎟 Entry: Free

Secure your open mic slot now: paul.robert.mullen.1982@gmail.com (note all those full stops!)

TWO

I read my poetics/poem 'The End of the Twentieth Century' (1999), from Twentieth Century Blues, at the Jerome Rothenberg Conference at the University of Glasgow on 22 March. 

The text of the introduction, where I talk about the network structure of Twentieth Century Blues, is (going to be) posted on this blog.

The conference was a great success, I thought. My little bit was requested by one of the organisers, Jeffrey C. Robinson. (I first met Jeffrey when he drove Jerome Rothenberg and his wife Diane on a reading tour, and all three stayed with Patricia and I, another great occasion.) I also talked about teaching Creative Writing with Scott Thurston, using Rothenberg and Joris' Poems for the Millennium (my poetics/poem also features a 'reading' of that anthology.    

Looking Back at ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ (and a half) and at some poems for, at, and beyond the millennium may be read in full here: Looking Back at ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ (and a half) and at some poems for, at, and beyond the millennium | English Studies in Latin America: A Journal of Cultural and Literary Criticism, from the online pages of English Studies of Latin America, January 2026.

Me reading my paper (photo: Scott Thurston)

 

THREE

I also read for Mary Earnshaw's Ainsdale readings Poets' Corner on Thursday 27th March, which was fun, and it was fully booked! Good responsive audience in a great venue (recommended for food and drink and bikes!) I read from British Standards : versions of Wordsworth (4), John Clare (4) and a single silly Shelley one, 'Astro Zen Knickers'. 

Photos of the event by the well-known Crosby photographer Ron Davies of: me; Eleanor reading to the room; Alison, Paul Mullen, me and David; me again.  

Here are a number of videos of me reading the poems, which, although not recordings of last night, will give you some idea of how they were performed. (These vids were made largely on the days I wrote the poems, and do differ a wee bit from the published versions.)

 The above is my version (transposition) of Wordsworth's 'One Might Believe'...

The above is my version of Clare's 'I Love to see the Old Heath's Withered Brake'...

The above is my version of Shelley's 'To Wordsworth', an address to a fallen hero, as is mine.

More on British Standards here, from the period when I wrote it: Pages: Transpositions of Hartley Coleridge: the end of British Standards (and of The English Strain project). It feels like ageing news now, and I need to read new work soon. 

Launch of Paul Robert Mullen's It's All Come Down to This, support and Q and A by me (set list)

The reading advertised above in Southport was to launch Paul's book. I wrote the introduction and I chaired a Q and A about the volume, and also read a short 10 minute set, along with others (including Alan Parry, the book's publisher, who read a long poem on masculinity, and Mary Earnshaw, a local poet, reading her 'conversations' with Leonard Cohen).  

I write about my Introduction (and therefore about the book!) here Pages: it's all come down to this by Paul Robert Mullen is out, with an introduction by me. and here: Pages: On a passage of Lutz Seiler and a lift from Billy Mills. 

Paul's book may be purchased here: it's all come down to this: a retrospective [selected poems & writings 1999-2024] - Paul Robert Mullen - The Broken Spine.

The venue, Royales, is a little gem in Southport and the vibe felt positive. Paul read well and our Q and A seemed to be coherent. We discussed how he felt about having such a big book out of 25 years' work. I particularly wanted to ask him about something I noticed, and commented upon in my introduction, about the clarity and imagistic acuity of his work and its contrary pull to withdrawal, leaving gaps for the reader, etc., and I quoted this enigmatic passage about poets from his 'Preface': 'Often wrapped up in webs of our own doing, we seek to unravel ourselves with explanations that, often, we're not prepared to deliver with any sort of direct and immediately decipherable intention.' I'm not sure we plumbed the depths of this one, but the importance of travel for his writing, the importance of music (and his knowing the difference between a poem and a song-lyric) followed. I noted that the prose pieces in the book move from being vignettes to short stories, and asked (offhand) whether he is writing a novel. He is! I was surprised to hear. A crazily-processed pic of our talk:

I read a short set, featuring the final poems in British Standards. 

As I read I indicated that I had serial problems stopping writing the book (the force of the political madness I was writing about) which is why the poem 'To Laughter' is followed by a section called 'After Laughter' which features the poems 'Afterword', 'After Image', 'Aftershock', and finally finally finally 'After Sheppard After Shelley: England in 2022', which got the book done!

 Here's a video (not from last night!) of me reading 'After Image'. 

British Standards may be read about here: Pages: British Standards published by Shearsman - out now, and bought here:  https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-British-Standards-p661920471

The various stages of the 'ending' of the book may be read about; it's quite a journey, and pretty funny as I try to divest my work of Bo(ris Johnson) in a number of posts on this blog. Unlike some of my work, the whole book was revealed as I progressed on these 'Pages'. Here's a few of the 'endings': for to end yet again!

The first is here: I said goodbye to Bo(ris), here, with a poem:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2022/08/final-extra-last-poem-of-english-strain.html

The second here:

Pages: Goodbye to Bo through the Medium of Jake Thackray’s masterpiece (not a book review) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

And then, here, finally, finally finally, here here here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: A final final poem for British Standards! But, of course, it wasn't the final final. I think this is:

Pages: The Horrible Thought that Bo mioght be back: only The Bard could save me now! Though I do leave open a fourth book of sonnets if Bo ever returns to frontline politics. Good help us, we've enough with convicted felon Trump at the moment.

I had to leave to catch the train (and bus) to get home and thus missed the music. I think Paul played. He also has an album on the way. Talented lad, that Paul. A good friend, and for the record, a former MA student in Creative Writing at Edge Hill where I taught him. He was part of a cohort where nearly everybody was a Dylan fan and a whole load of us went to see The Man at the (then) Echo Arena. Paul recommends the new film.  

Oh, and here's a report on the first Broken Spine reading, in March 2020, days before the lockdown. That seemed a different world, and here's a glimpse of it: Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Broken Spine reading, Southport (set list).

Paul Robert Mullen Book Launch (and my small part to play) 29th January

 See here for report on the launch: Pages: Launch of Paul Robert Mullen's It's All Come Down to This, support and Q and A by me (set list)

it's all come down to this by Paul Robert Mullen is out, with an introduction by me.

it’s all come down to this: a retrospective (1999–2024) [the publisher tells us] is the defining collection from Paul Robert Mullen, brought to life by The Broken Spine with the expert editorial touch of Alan Parry. This anthology gathers over two decades of Mullen’s poetry, offering a deeply personal yet universal meditation on identity, memory, and the passage of time.

 

I provided an introduction to this volume.

Mullen’s sparse, emotionally charged style has been celebrated for its honesty and craft, with poems that weave through themes of separation, reflection, and rediscovery. [The publisher continues.] The collection spans his earliest work, such as Issues, Tissues & the Senseless Comic, to newer, unreleased writings in rags of light. With a voice that remains unflinchingly authentic, Mullen captures moments of longing, heartbreak, and resolution that will resonate with readers of contemporary poetry. 

it’s all come down to this may be purchased it here:

https://thebrokenspine.co.uk/product/itsallcomedowntothismullen/

it's all come down to this: a retrospective [selected poems & writings 1999-2024] - Paul Robert Mullen –

While I was musing on the introduction, or rather about how to write it, I came upon an interesting distinction between 'song' and 'story' by the German poet Lutz Seiler, and I wrote about the quotation here: Pages: On a passage of Lutz Seiler and a lift from Billy Mills. It led me down certain paths, away from Paul's book. Later, I integrated this quotation into my introduction to to it's all come down to this, which begins with these words:

I find the contemporary German lyric poet Lutz Seiler puts the matter better than I could: ‘“Everyone has only one song,” said the writer Paul Bowles in one of his last interviews. (He was also a musician.) You recognise the song by its sound. The sound forms in the instrument we ourselves have become over time. Before every poem comes the story we have lived. The poem catches the sound of it. Rather than narrating the story, it narrates its sound.’ This seems an apt way of talking about the poems of Paul Robert Mullen, where what he calls ‘a lifetime between two covers’ is transmuted into a song, a song that is intensely personal, though not necessarily flagrantly autobiographical, or where autobiography has become song, a distant echo of fact. Mullen no longer tells the story: he offers us that condensed sound, that song, that story of the sound of the poem. That is its artifice, of course, which I shall be examining below. However, it is worth dwelling on the musical analogy. Like Seiler, commenting on Bowles, I can say ‘Mullen is also a musician,’ one who I have seen perform (and I possess his entertaining CD Alchemy in the Garden). Although I will pursue the metaphor of ‘song’ in relation to Mullen – he writes much of music as part of that story of his life – it is important that he never confuses a song lyric for a poem (or vice versa). His songs are another story, and music is only part – an important part, as I shall show – of the story of his verse.

It's a distinction that carries on into the poems (and a little prose) that I examine in more detail in my response to Paul’s considerable collection of his work. And I conclude: ‘These are the ‘writings’ of the subtitle: ‘selected poems and writings 1999-2024’, a title and dating that reminds us that that story that Mullen has lived is a long one. The sounds that he has made during, and from, that life, are often exquisite and always truly affective.’

But to read the rest of the introduction and (more importantly!) the rest of the book, you'll have to buy it here: https://thebrokenspine.co.uk/product/itsallcomedowntothismullen/

it's all come down to this: a retrospective [selected poems & writings 1999-2024] - Paul Robert Mullen –

 

 Here's author, publisher and introducer mulling over matters literary.